


Sublingual

by Maugris



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen, General Unpleasantness, Non-Graphic Violence, mid-canon and post-canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2015-08-18
Packaged: 2018-04-15 09:38:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4601895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maugris/pseuds/Maugris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's like a pill placed right under her tongue -- a quick, bright shock.  Things are simple, just then.  Her hands and their controlled violence.  His hands and the violence they have done, empty and grasping on the floor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sublingual

It starts like this:

One day at the camp and a moment of weakness, a quiet moment in the corner hunched over with her hands in her mouth, her teeth biting into her knuckles, shaking in a kind of helpless spitting rage. They expect so damn much from her. To be a leader, to be a daughter -- to be a general and still a child. They expect her to get results and keep her hands clean.

Her hands aren't clean, though. There's blood and bone ash driven deep under her fingernails.

She'd found privacy, sometimes, back on the dropship. One hundred people (and dropping all the time) is not so very many. But here? Any moment now, a hand will land on her shoulder, someone will say in a voice dripping with pity _Clarke, kid, go and get some rest --_

"Must be hard, living a life so full of love and respect," Murphy says.

Clarke straightens abruptly, her jaw closing with a click as her fingers slip from it. Murphy is standing there all akilter, the sharp angles of his elbows and shoulders and his stupid pointy face arranged without any sort of harmony. There are unhealed scores like clawmarks down the side of his face and a red whisper of ropescar under his chin. He's looking at her like she's dirt under his shoe.

"No one asked you for your opinion, Murphy," she snaps.

"Poor princess," he says. "Women want to be her, men want to put her to bed with a blankie and a cup of soup. Every word that drops from her lips is a perfect pearl. So kind, so wise." He grins, stretching the red lines along his cheekbone. "So _damaged._ "

She feels hot and then cold and then perfectly at peace again, buzzing with purpose, balanced on a spearpoint. She is angry, she is so fucking angry, and here in front of her is a boy who's done nothing but spit out every second chance she's ever afforded him. She wants to wipe that smug, crooked smile off his face.

So she does.

It's mostly surprise that takes him down -- standing off-balance like that as a pretty blonde peacekeeper charges at him swinging, clumsy fists at his jawline and a shoulder to his chest. He drops fast and hard, his head hitting the floor with a sound like a foot breaking through a rotten log.

Clarke follows him down, stumbling to rest with her knee in his gut and her hands hovering over his throat. She doesn't clamp down, though. Something about the fixed way he is staring at her, the glossy wideness of his eyes and the blood on his teeth from where he's bitten his lip.

"What's stopping you?" he says, a hoarse whisper with the bubble of blood in it.

She ghosts her fingers over the mark on his neck and he flinches, a tiny muscle shudder that she feels in her knees more than she sees it. "Because I'm better than that," she says gently. "I'm better than you."

Her knee grinds into his ribs as she gets to her feet and she's surprised to find herself shaking. Just a little. She feels blank, burned clean. She used to make art and now she throws punches. That's just how things are. People change. Things change them.

"You're not any better than me," Murphy says, but he makes no move to get up.

And Clarke thinks: _okay, maybe not. Maybe I'm not,_ and she stills the quiver of her fingers by folding them into a fist as she walks away.

#

So that's how things are, at least for a little while. Clarke is clear-eyed and decisive and fair and she doesn't lose her temper. She makes plans with Raven and Bellamy and she works around her mother the best that she can. She does what she can for as long as she's needed. 

Nights are still hard -- sometimes she can't sleep, just lies there awake with a racing mind that won't quit replaying _what if, what if._ Thinking about Finn and the last time she touched him and the way he's become an entirely different person, just like that. Sometimes she cries, but mostly she does not. Just lies there blinking and thinks.

She thinks: I could have done something different.

And then there are days when she breaks, loosens the stays on her iron control and she can't be alone, she can't be calm, she just needs to _hurt someone._ It's a palpable, measurable thing, like ten thousand bees are swarming under her skin and she can't be still anymore, she simply cannot. But it's okay, this feeling -- she manages it. It's okay because she has Murphy, and Murphy wants to be hurt.

It's not a sex thing or anything weird. Sometimes one of them might get off but it's never the point. The point is to have him there under her looking up, dry-eyed and needing and afraid but so pliant. Her teeth in his shoulder or a little knife in her hands.

He spooks easily, so she tries to learn what sets him off. It's a selfish thing they are doing and while it feels good to unload a little of her anger on another person, there's nothing satisfying about the way Murphy shrinks in on himself when he panics, breathing in painful gasps like he's hanging even still.

She can touch his neck, but she has to go slow. Best to avoid the nest of thick new keloid scars at the base of his spine or the lick of burns on his feet. They're grounder marks, she knows, and does not ask about them. 

"What would mommy think," he says, lip curled back from his teeth, because the day Murphy stops talking is the day they'll dig his grave. "What would Bellamy think? His precious princess, all grown up and strangling people."

Bellamy wouldn't understand. He's tough and he has been cruel before but never like this. He's more straightforward than this.

"Shut up, Murphy," she says, and leans down, pressing her wrist into the base of his throat.

It's like a pill placed right under her tongue -- a quick, bright shock. Everything is clear, the murk gone behind her. Things are simple, just then. Her hands and their controlled violence. His hands and the violence they have done, empty and grasping on the floor.

Nothing she does surprises him, because he's used to being disposable. He thinks he deserves it -- to be punished, to be made small. There's nothing special about her. Anyone could do it. Just tell him the things he already knows about himself.

"Worthless," she spits, unsure if she's talking about him or about herself.

_I know,_ his face says, _God, don't you think I already know that,_ and his mouth curves in something that is almost, but not quite, a smile.

#

And then there is Lincoln -- slack-jawed, all sweat and rolling eyes -- and then there is Lexa. Lexa and her ultimatum.

"Maybe I deserve to die," Finn says, and Clarke wants to scream. He killed eighteen and she killed three hundred. Eighteen innocents shot emptyhanded at close range or three hundred fighters blasted away just out of sight, brutal and fast and bright. In the end, is there a difference? Maybe their crimes weren't the same but her soul doesn't feel any cleaner than his. She doesn't like to touch people, these days, because it feels like her fingers trail dark slime over their skin.

Later, she catches a quiet moment to drink and close her eyes, just for the space of a few breaths. It's like cheating, somehow -- because things are undone, nothing is right yet, and she doesn't have time to rest. But it's getting harder and harder to keep going. Adrenaline only goes so far.

"We'll fix this," Bellamy says, sitting beside her with a heavy _whump_ of weight and settling cloth. He has such presence, an authority in his voice and the breadth of his shoulders. He settles her and can catch her when she falters.

"I know," she says, without opening her eyes. "I just don't know how yet."

"You'll figure it out," he says. This time he doesn't say _we._ Clarke is the rational one, the thinker and the planner. It's up to her to figure this shit out.

And she doesn't figure it out. She has plans and none of them amount to shit. She watches Finn present himself to the grounders and there's this little knot in her stomach that tells her _this is it._ There's nothing else she can do, no way to get him out of this.

Raven is inconsolable -- Raven is bright and furious. She presses a little blade into Clarke's hands and Clarke takes it without thinking about how she'll use it but later, when she looks back on that moment, she knows there was never a chance she'd use it on Lexa. Their alliance is too important. After all, her people are still caged in the mountain, waiting for help. She couldn't forget them if she tried. She sees their faces when she tries to sleep, pictures them hung upside down for their blood and wakes with a scream in her throat.

She pushes the blade into Finn and his hot blood spools out over her hands but she knows no one can see it, not yet. They still have this quiet moment together, her and this boy who had loved her. Bleeding fiercely on hostile ground like some kind of sacrificial animal.

Finn dies quietly and Clarke herself is quiet. She turns to Lexa and she reels herself together, because there is still work to be done and she cannot let herself fall apart. Not yet.

# 

And after it all, after everything has been done, she leaves. 

She doesn't set off in any particular direction -- where is there to go? (Come to Polis with me, Lexa had said.) But she picks a direction and walks that way with purpose, because she's lost the ability to do anything halfheartedly.

She finds a guide through the desert and fully expects to be mugged and left for dead, but apparently she has nothing worth the effort to steal. Or else her face buys her some credit, hooded and quiet as she is. She doesn't share her name with anyone, but people still talk about the blonde sky girl who took down the mountain.

They travel at night and rest during the day and she rolls her face into her pack and tries to sleep, tries to shut out the sun. Weather is still a strange thing, even after all this time. Unrecycled air, the glare and the heat, sandgrit on the wind. A peeling sunburn across the bridge of her nose.

And then they reach a certain dune, crested and tall and no different to her eyes than the hundred others they've scrabbled up before. But at this dune, her guide turns to her and says, "After this you'll have to go on alone."

"What?" Clarke says, startled. They haven't spoken much that day and her throat feels dry as gauze. 

"I won't go any further," the grounder girl says. She looks to the left and the right as if she's checking for eavesdroppers in a crowd, but there's no one around them for miles. Only dappled dunes and the distant cries of vultures. 

"I've seen the drones," the girl says finally.

She shows Clarke what to look for -- low flying things, a buzz and a flash of red lights -- and tells her to drop to the sand if she sees them and lie utterly still.

"Will that help?" 

Clarke's no technician, not a mind like Raven or Monty, but even she knows that if a machine like that is trying to find people, it'll find them whether they're still or not. Even a hidden person has a heartbeat and a heat signature.

"Maybe," the grounder girl says, and gives her a helpless shrug.

For a moment, Clarke thinks about turning back. But instead, she says, "Thank you for your help," because she'd been raised polite and some things stick like that.

The grounder girl gives her half their water and enough food to last a few more days. Maybe a week, if she goes lean.

"Don't cross the water," the girl says. "You can eat the shellfish on the beach but you shouldn't step in the water. Not one toe. All right?"

"All right," Clarke says. She doesn't know what the girl means by _water_ or _beach_ \-- not stranded here in the middle of the godforsaken desert. It seems like all the world could be sand.

"Good luck, Clarke," the girl says, and turns her back to retreat. She steps in her own footprints, walking light as a deer down the shifting slope.

Clarke had never told the girl her name. She stands there for a moment, wondering, then pulls her hood more snugly against her cheeks. She'd never planned to be notorious. Somehow it had just worked out that way.

#

When she stood beneath the solar panels, Jaha's voice came singing back to her: _City of Light. City of Light._ Poor man. Was this what he had found, after all that agitation? Had he brought his little band all the way here and seen what passed for light?

The solar panels are days behind her now. She paces by the water, following the curve of what must be a bay. She's run out of food, but has found little armored things burrowed in the sand that taste sweet and briny when smashed open and sucked living from their shells.

So far there's been no indication of what prompted the grounder girl to warn her away from the water, but that's probably a good thing. She keeps an eye on the tide and watched for shapes on the horizon, something that might be a ship or a creature. She remembers the thing that attacked Octavia, back their very first day on the ground. The waters of earth have changed fast, maybe faster than anything on the ground.

She walks and walks and sees nothing but beach and endless waves.

There's something ahead of her, some destination she's bound to reach. If there was only this stretch of beach the girl wouldn't have given such specific directions. She thinks this each time she lies down to sleep (in the evening now, with the cool sea breezes ruffling her hair.) Maybe she is meant to do this. Maybe even this endless walk is in service of her people.

After a week, she is out of water and considering drinking the sea and she has started to come to terms with the thought that she is dying. There are worse ways to go, probably. Sucked dry of bone marrow inside a steel fortress is probably a worse way to go. This thought sparks an absurd, weak little giggle that makes her cracked lips bleed.

Just a little farther, then. Just a little farther.

She's walked for maybe hours or maybe only minutes when she hears the crack of a gunshot. She knows this sound intimately. It's not something that can be mistaken for anything else. So she drops on an instinct and hits the sand hard on her belly, hands scrabbling for a weapon. She huffs a hard breath that sends a hundred sand fleas scurrying for cover.

"Turn back," says a voice, and it's a familiar voice but she can't find the body it belongs to. Hidden in the cover of the rocks, maybe. "Turn back or next it'll be your fucking head."

_Oh,_ she thinks, and the tension goes out of her. Oh -- she turns her head to rest on the sand. Was this what she'd been looking for, all along?

A scrunch of shifting sand, footsteps coming closer. Distant seabird cries and the rasping breath of a person drawing near. One way or another, she won't walk out of this one.

"Clarke?" Murphy says hesitantly, but the sun is so dazzling and so hot on her skin that her eyes slip closed and everything is brilliant and white and there's no noise but the ringing of her ears. It's soft and quiet and just like she'd imagined it, when she let herself think of dying. There's the bright and the dim and there's nothing more, after that.

#

She wakes up feeling prickly and smothered, wrapped like a parcel in a bad-smelling but exceedingly comfortable bed. It's a massive thing, all smooth dark sheets and musty down. The room fits it, wall-to-wall dark wood and black and white photographs and tasteful draperies. It's luxurious and it reeks of decay.

There's a glass of water by the bedside, so she drinks it. Her hands shake just a little and water tips over the rim of the glass to the carpet below. She still feels dazzled, and spots play in the corners of her vision as she looks slowly around the room. Finding the door, looking for windows. (There aren't any windows. Is that strange?)

But mostly she's tired. Her limbs are so heavy and it seems too much work to move them.

Time passes in uncertain jerks and the light changes and changes back and then Murphy is there at the side of the bed, leaving her a new glass of water and something slopping and savory-smelling in a glazed bowl.

"Hey," he says, when he notices she's awake. He sets the bowl down carefully and then crosses his arms across his chest and tilts his chin down. He looks like a turtle pulling into its shell.

"Hey," she says, her voice only a croak.

Murphy doesn't help her drink, though her hands still shake and she spills more water on the bed. It's weird to think of him bringing her back here, dragging or carrying her along the beach and inside whatever hidey-hole he's found for himself, tucking her into bed and bringing her soup.

The coddling's over, if the blank look on his face is any indication. That's fine by her.

Greetings out of the way, they stay there still and watch each other, waiting for one of them to make a move. Clarke carefully moves the glass back to the bedside table without spilling another drop.

"Why did you bring me here?" she says.

Murphy snorts and curls his lip, but the tension's broken -- the set of his shoulders collapses and he knots his fingers in his cuffs. "Would you rather have me leave you there? You were already par-boiled."

"Don't be a dick," she says, and he actually smiles. Murphy doesn't smile much -- it looks funny on his face.

"I didn't want you to die," he says. "So don’t test me, okay?"

"Gonna change your mind?"

"You never know," he says, and Clarke almost says something sharp and fast about Myles and Connor and _yeah, you never know,_ but she stops herself. Maybe Jaha's here and maybe he isn't. Maybe it would be wiser to hold her tongue around this boy, at least for now.

"Okay," she says instead. Simple and tired.

Murphy looks momentarily off-balance, like he'd been waiting for her to snap back something snarky and she'd disappointed him. But then, his first language was sarcasm and everything he ever said in plain English seemed to go through some kind of translating algorithm that didn't always catch the nuance.

"Eat your soup," he says, and turns on his heel to leave.

Clarke watches him go. He looks much the same, to her -- a little cleaner, dressed in a strange motley of clothes like what they'd worn in Mount Weather. No visible wounds on his face or hands, which is an oddity all by itself. But he hasn't put on a scrap of weight, still bony and hungry-lean. He still carries himself like a starving wolf, skulking around the edges of the pack but unwelcome among them.

It confuses her, just a little. He's found himself in the place of luxury but he's not any more at ease than he was back at the dropship. Back on the Ark, maybe. She blows out a sigh and turns to the bowl of soup he's left her. It's a thin broth, salty and a little gritty at the bottom -- probably something rehydrated from an envelope. It tastes more delicious than she can possibly say.

#

After a couple days, Clarke gets enough of her strength back that she feels comfortable tottering around the place, trailing the bed comforter behind her like a cape. Outside her palatial bedroom she finds an enormous bathroom (two sinks, a shower big enough for four people) and then, down the hallway, a little kitchen and a central room with racked wine and a television that snaps to life as she passes it. It scares the shit out of her -- one moment she's tiptoeing around an overstuffed armchair to make sure Murphy's not sitting in it and then the next there's a hiss of static and a man in a bathrobe staring out at her with desperate eyes. She watches, transfixed, as he raises a gun to his chest.

And again, that _popcrack_ \-- that singular sound.

"I don't know how to make it stop," Murphy says, and she whirls around to see him standing leaned up against the wall, a glass of amber liquid in his hand. "I turned it on once and now it plays every time you go past. Mostly I just try not to get too close to it."

"Is that the man who used to live here?"

"Yeah, I guess," he says. "I don't really know what he's talking about, but." He hesitates, taking a sip. "I think Jaha knows. By now, at least."

There's no one in this place but Murphy. She's paced around it and even the places she hasn't gone don't have the look or sound of inhabited space. Murphy bounces around this place like a marble.

"Whoever he's talking about has to be long dead, right? Why would Jaha go looking for them?"

"Who knows what that guy is looking for," Murphy says. "Not like he ever told the rest of us. Only this bullshit about _faith_ and _destiny_ and it didn't mean shit in the end."

Clarke gives a slow nod. She knows what that's like.

Murphy leaves and then returns with a second cut-glass tumbler full of what proves to be sharp liquor, strong and heady on her tongue but infinitely better than Monty's gasoline-scented moonshine. She holds the glass carefully in both hands and takes a long sip.

"Cheers to surviving this long, I guess," Murphy says, and she clinks her glass with his.

For a while, they sit on the musty carpet in companionable silence, far enough from the TV to keep the video loop from triggering again. Clarke keeps her comforter wrapped around her shoulders and waits to speak. There are things she wants to ask him -- where is Jaha, where are the people who came with him? what happened to them on their way? -- but more than that, there are things she doesn't want him to ask her. Like _hey, that Mount Weather thing. How did that turn out?_

But of course it comes up. Silence only lasts so long.

"Why did you leave?" he says, eventually.

There's a lie on the tip of her tongue -- something easy and believable, _there was a fight,_ maybe _my mom sent me, I'm looking for Jaha_ \-- but she bites it back. What's the point? She doesn't care what Murphy thinks of her. And anyway, he'll probably understand completely.

"I -- did some things I'm not proud of," she says, then pauses, rolls a mouthful of whiskey over her tongue, swallows. "To survive. And they worked and we made it and everyone's home but now I don't deserve to be with them. I'm not that person they knew anymore."

He laughs, but there's no humor in it. His face gone blank and dull. "Yeah, that's right. 'Cause everyone back there is so innocent."

"No," she says, because they're not. "But they're getting better."

They fall into a quiet, confessional kind of mood, sitting hunched on the floor getting steadily drunk off ancient booze. They ask each other inane questions and get stupid answers back. Murphy wonders how long it takes Octavia to do her hair like that and Clarke tells him about how grounder braids have caught on back at the camp, how people sit around in circles carefully twisting their friends' greasy hair into clumsy braids that look like birdsnests.

"Octavia did my hair once," he says, very casually, and Clarke stares. She can't picture it -- Octavia deigning to put her hands in his hair, Murphy allowing himself to be so still and vulnerable in front of another person. Especially one who carries as many knives as Octavia.

"So I guess she has a second career after she's done slinging swords," Clarke says, listening to the background hum of machinery in the walls. It's much like what she'd been used to back on the Ark -- small spaces, machine buzzing, stale air. It's comfortable, in its own way.

Being here with Murphy doesn't feel as strange as it probably should. She stills remembers everything about him -- how he'd looked as he was hanged, the people he's murdered, his ribcage pressed between her knees, the way he'd shuddered under her knife -- but those things are past. The urgency is gone.

"You gonna go back there?"

"I don't know," she says. "You?"

"I don't know," he echoes. "Probably not."

They sit in silence for a while longer. It's impossible to tell how much time is passing -- her head all fogged with liquor, the steady artificial light and the windowless walls. She doesn't even know if it's day or night outside. Much less what her people are doing, back at the camp. How they're doing. Like: are Jasper and Monty friends again? have Octavia and Lincoln decided to settle down and have a hundred beautiful warrior babies? is someone making sure that Raven eats and sleeps?

Is Bellamy okay? Is her mom okay?

"Murphy," she says, and he looks at her. She licks her lips and set her glass on the floor. "Why did you kill those two boys, back at the dropship?"

The quiet good humor goes out of his face instantly. The smile drops and there's that dead, sullen expression, the blank animal eyes. This is the Murphy she knows, and it's too hard to tell which face is the mask.

"They hurt me once," he says, almost too soft to hear. "They would do it again."

"You didn't have to kill them," she says. "They were our people! You can't _do_ that, Murphy. We're supposed to look out for each other, especially down here. Who else can we trust?"

Not Lexa, she thinks, and wishes her glass wasn't empty.

Abruptly, Murphy stands. In the corner of the room, the TV flicks on and the man's death-tape begins to play.

"Maybe you think we're different than the grounders, but we're not," he says. He doesn't look at her while he talks -- his gaze is fixed on the television and the man with the gun. "People are just people, okay? And people are animals. They'll fuck you any way they can."

_That's not true,_ Clarke goes to say, but the words die on her lips. Instead, she says, "We have to fight together, or we'll never survive."

"Good thing I have this little place to myself, then," Murphy says, and leaves the room.

#

She stays a little while longer, until she's healed and strong and just starting to feel stir-crazy. She's walked the beach around the lighthouse and gone a ways into the grass but until now she's been tethered by her own weak body -- she gets headaches, still, gets winded walking up hills. But there are things out there, beyond this bunker. Jaha's gone on and she needs to know what he's found and what it means for the rest of them. She needs to know where the drones come from.

And now that she's stronger, Murphy's started to act strange around her. He's sharper, meaner -- he pulls into her space and then shrinks away when she makes a move. She doesn't understand it until one day, when she's standing in the kitchen eating hundred-year-old oatmeal and she hears the door open and shut -- Murphy coming back in from the beach.

"Honey, I'm home," he calls, and Clarke doesn't dignify this with a response. He finds her there anyway, steps into the kitchen with his hair full of sand and a slimy fish in his hands.

"Did you catch that?" she says as he drops the fish on the counter. It's huge, fat and nearly as long as her arm, and its mouth is lined with jaggedy teeth.

"No, it fell from the sky." He curls his lip at her in what sometimes passes for a smile and pulls a knife from the magnetic strip on the wall.

"You're such an asshole sometimes," she says. Not like it's news.

"Yeah? So do something about it."

Clarke puts her oatmeal down on the table and raises a hand -- just to push through her hair, a mark of how goddamn exasperating it is to try and have a conversation with this boy. But he sees her raise the hand and he flinches hard back into the countertop, his breath stopped in his throat and this certain sheen to his eyes. Like anticipation.

Shit, she thinks, and cradles her hand back to her chest. She holds it there, her fingers twisted together, and watches him watch her. He'd been -- _baiting_ her. Waiting for her to snap.

"Murphy," she says, more gently than she'd meant to. She steps forward to take the knife from his hands. He lets her do it, sagging back against the counter, staring at the knife and how it catches the ceiling lights and shines them back into his eyes when it's turned a certain way.

"Just do it," he says.

"No."

Murphy wets his lips with the tip of his tongue and she speaks up fast before he can say anything else. She's horribly sure he was about to say _please._

"I'm not that person anymore," she says. "Okay? You don't have to -- I don't need that anymore."

He looks between the knife and her face and back again. His voice is like a crackle of static, a jammed radio frequency. But Mount Weather is dead and Bellamy's not there to help her.

Murphy says, "But I do."

She raises her empty hand to his cheek and then catches it in his hair. She's thinking _no, no, not this. I ran away from all this. I left it at the base of the mountain._

"No," she says again.

Murphy sneers at her, but it looks like it takes more effort than normal. "So I guess I didn't know you as well as I thought."

"You knew me," she says. "But I changed."

He shrugs out of her grasp and turns back to the fish, the set of his shoulders tense and defensive. Clarke pads quietly out of the kitchen. She'll stay one more night, then leave in the morning. She thinks Murphy probably knows that already, without her having to say a word.

She thinks about the hundred ways the Earth has broken them, about the wire and thread and seatbelts they've scavenged to tie themselves together again. There are people waiting for her, and they'd take her back with open arms and fold her into that junkyard life and she would once again be Clarke Griffin, queen of the Sky People. They would even take Murphy back, if he wanted it. Her people are like that. They're more than what he said, more than vicious animals fighting to survive. She has to believe it -- otherwise, what was any of it for?

No, it's her who's the animal, these days. Her teeth grew too sharp, too used to crushing throats, and bad dogs get sent away.

So she files those teeth down, a stroke at a time, and maybe one day soon she'll be civilized enough to go back home.

"Thank you for saving me," she says, back to the kitchen door. She can't see Murphy inside, but she hears him go still. "Back on the beach. I'm not sure I ever thanked you."

Murphy, for his part, says nothing at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, this is just a character study, I said. Just a little flash piece, I said. Like a warmup!
> 
> HAHA.
> 
> Anyway, I'm still trying to work on writing shorter and quicker, so if anyone has anything they'd like to read, give me a prompt and maybe I'll take a stab at it.
> 
> 8/23: Mild edits to fix a couple wonky sentences.


End file.
